Delicate Puzzle
by LabyrinthDweller
Summary: A study of Eileen, through Henry's exploration as he picks up the pieces of who she used to be.


_What a rotten, shitty weekend. This is what you get from it._

_Writing this supercharged with negative emotions (mostly frustration and sadness) means that the story winds around itself and is choppy, but in a way it fits. It's its own taped puzzle._

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_**Delicate Puzzle**

She hadn't really noticed when it was gone. It wasn't until he brought her the first piece that she was aware that it had been missing. The first piece held her fear, reminded her of what it was she was feeling, of what she should feel. At first she hated him for it, hated him because he brought her a name to that emotion, because she was afraid of him in the first place.

He didn't know it, though.

He didn't know what he was doing, what it was that he was picking up off of the ground that wasn't there. Still he picked them up though he was overwhelmed by millions, billions of them. Each one he picked up with care, making sure not to hurt himself or break it further. Every one he found told a different story, invoked a different emotion within him, gave him a deep knowledge of a personal being.

But just because he had knowledge doesn't mean he understood. The first ones he picked up brought such a raw sorrow that at first he thought they were cursed. Continuation would mean a poisoning of his spirit, and he should stop at once.

The sorrow felt of knowing you had died with debts to repay and wounds to mend.

Sorrow from feeling as though you died too early, before your time.

Sorrow that your pain had not ended, and you were doomed to live that pain in this hellish, endless purgatory.

He returned to her from their separation, sorrowed piece in hand. She looked at him, the same sorrow in her uncovered eye. Then they both understood.

Her spirit was missing, this she knew now. Tangled in her despair she had no motivation to find what had become of it. She knew she needed it to thrive, but lost here she didn't believe she'd have that chance again.

He didn't know if it was by accident or on purpose, but he found himself picking up the pieces of what used to be her spirit, her essence. Hell, he didn't want to. He was awful at this sort of intimacy, but he did so anyway. The lost stare in her face made him sick, knowing that he wasn't much different. Alone, he returned time and time again, no longer picking up the pieces but now gathering them together, as many as he could at a time. He saw what they were now—shards of her being scattered about, sharp edges and rounded corners defining the personality and nature of each.

A jagged piece, marking the turning point of her life, the electric fear and rocketing pain from The Attack, the desperate instinct to kill or be killed, the want to survive.

A sharp, rounded piece. The notion of failure in survival, the life ebbing away from life-giving blood.

A sunken piece—the feeling of defeat, of the omega of her life. She was useless in the real and the alternative world; the real didn't want her, and she burdened the one light that might lead her back to the reality that had rejected her so.

Another piece, curved frantically in an uncomfortable way—the painful anticipation, waiting in a world too horrifying to have been imagined by a human, waiting to die, waiting for salvation, waiting for anything to happen.

Gathering them up he returned to her, gave her the pieces of her lost spirit. She'd never respond. Sometimes she didn't notice. Sometimes he wasn't enough.

He continued to collect the fallen shards, from all corners of the place with no floor. Often times he didn't know what he was learning when he picked a shard up. Psychology was not something he excelled at. It was the reason for his shyness, his ultimate loneliness. Regardless he learned without the needed wisdom, without the knowledge.

Every memory that had shaped her life, from the fights her parents had to her fondest moments with her friends. The compassion she shared with a dying animal, the favorite doll she had given away as a child. The love she had shared almost absent-mindedly, a mother without having birthed a child.

He saw why she had been chosen as "The Mother Reborn."

The compassion had been replaced by confusion, the love replaced by an internal fear of everyone around her.

He saw himself as she would see him.

Before The Attack he was a shadow in the background, appearing every so often with common courtesy. He was sloppy with his appearance, that didn't attract her. But he was, in a quiet way, kind. With the way her luck had turned before the party, she was actually considering on asking him to it. It was worth a shot anyway.

Until the noises. Until The Attack.

She looked at him so differently now. There were multiple shards together struggling to depict who she thought he was.

She looked to him as a canary in a coal mine. He was her way out—a savior, _maybe_ an angel, but she wouldn't go that far. He protected her fiercely, but wasn't he simply protecting himself in the process? The blood of humans as well as monsters stained his skin. Trying to explain only led to more suspicion. The shy man next door had turned into what appeared to be an axe murderer. Danger emanated around him. Why didn't he ever talk to her? Did he not want to get close to someone he was about to murder? What did he mean by "saw all those people getting killed"?

Then again, he wanted to save her. He had mentioned so in talking about the letter from the previous tenant. And, to be perfectly honest, he looked just as afraid as she was.

The hardest shards to pick up were the hollow ones. They slipped past his fingers, evaded his mind, never becoming material enough for him to comprehend. It wasn't until with some difficulty that he brought the pieces to her that he saw what the hollow ones were.

One was a pit that continuously grew deeper the more they descended into an alternate world. A gap in her life that quite possibly everyone in the world suffered from, a gap he was dimly aware of in himself. To be truthful he didn't think she was suffering from this, and so deeply too.

She was caught, trapped in a place beneath the earth in a desperate need for love.

Not familial love. She already had plenty of that sort of love that could turn bitter with a flash of misunderstanding. She was looking for a life-lasting friend that understood and tolerated her every aspect, allowing her to return the favor. Things aren't always a storybook ending. Boyfriends had come and gone, with only sparks of what she wanted and needed. She sat in the pit, giving up her useless attempts to climb the slippery slopes.

He looked into that very pit and saw himself.

Another hollow piece burned hotly in the palm of his rough hand, the youthful want of ecstasy. She had come close to fulfilling this emptiness, twice when she and her boyfriend had gotten lost in a hot smother of breaths. Something had interrupted both times though, things she couldn't remember. It didn't matter. Perhaps it was better that way, but the immature, lustful need still remained, scorching an animalistic hole within her. Being here, feeling like the last woman on earth with the last man, the lust seemed to try and grab a hold of her, pulling her down into a red mist. Each time she fought it back, for this was not the time or place for such things to happen.

Such a hole too burned within him, a rush of hormones suppressed every time their skin touched. Survival was the primary rule of this world, survival of themselves and those after them.

The last of this kind that he could remember bringing back to her was the one that cut him the most. His hands bled profusely from holding it in them, and the feeling of giving the piece back to her sent shameful bolts of betrayal in him, for this was another sign that he himself simply wasn't enough to help her in any way.

Her security had been clawed out clumsily, leaving deep scars in her confidence. Where there once was an independent woman happy with life there now was an abused girl, trembling in the corner from the mere mention of life itself. Where the other hollow pieces could eventually be filled to be overflowing with whatever it was she needed, this one was almost sure to never be restored; the scars had run too deep, splitting her sense of safety and cutting down to every branch of her life, corrupting everything it touched. And there was nothing, nothing at all that could be done to salvage anything.

He didn't feel safe here, either, but nothing he felt could compare to the rigid canyon that carved its way through her body.

There were other pieces, things that were so insignificant he felt as though he could just leave it there in the floorless plain, but guilt always made him pick every last piece up, to the very far reaches of the dimension. It took a very long period, too long. By the time he had picked up the last piece there, it was too late. The last piece he had gathered from the plain of nothingness was the smallest one of them all but gleamed with the brightest light that was constantly being eaten and replaced by unseen forces.

It was the bottom of her Pandora's Box, the glimmer of hope she had left for herself and this world.

By the time he picked it up she had left him, left him to walk towards her death in a pool of blood. And that one ray of light that he still held in his hand as he fought for her the hardest he could nearly went out.

He gave the last piece of her to a bouquet of flowers, which he delivered to her himself in the morning sun as she sat in the hospital, wounds almost fully healed. Had the light of the last piece of her spirit went out there wouldn't be a bouquet of flowers to give, a smile to practice but fail to provide, a blessed release from the confines of the evil apartment. As she held the flowers in her delicate hands he felt as though he had truly done what he had set out to do: survive.

And yet, it wasn't enough. All he could do was give her back what had once been hers; it was up to her whether she knitted everything back together or not. As it would be, they disappeared from each other's sight shortly after they had moved out. He decided it was the end, just another girl that he had come to adore that would never look in his direction twice. He never pushed, never pulled, just simply stood there until the current of the river brought him someone new—even if the memory of the last one burned sweetly still in the embrace of slumber.

She, in turn, secluded herself from the world, sitting on her bed with all the billions of pieces that he had gathered together for her sake, for her survival. It took her days, weeks, for her to put the puzzle pieces back together. When he had found them he couldn't connect one to the other; the shards simply did not fit each other. But in her soft fingers and patient eyes she welded them together, weaving one into the other, making her spirit born again. Things were left behind; the love she gave to everyone suddenly vanished, replaced with wariness. Those who knew her before The Attack thought that she had changed in a way so drastic that oil had become water.

In a way, she had. And she accepted it, putting one piece together after the other, manipulating her emotions around to suit her. She was the Mother _Reborn_. She had the power to resurrect her old self if need be to those she felt deserved it.

At the completion of her spirit, she saw only one who deserved it, one who could be great enough to fill the darkest hollowness she had lost with The Attack and years prior. It wouldn't be hard to find that one. She knew his address. She knew his business, listed in the yellow pages for photography. She had learned these things, all to keep her afloat if something went awry during the time she rebuilt herself.

She met him again, after so many days of being apart. He thought, and he told her this, that he'd never see her again. Smiling ever so small, she pressed her body against his, taped spirit and all, and told him what she had found during her seclusion, told him the truth.

As storybooks would have it, the hollowness was filled. Perhaps not completely, perhaps not eternally, but just enough so that the pieces of the puzzle would never drift apart, only grow and shape themselves to a life born as her stomach swelled gradually, allowing her to fulfill her title as the Mother Reborn.


End file.
